Volume 11, Number 1, April-June 2015

Constraint Programming News

Editors:

Guido Tack, Pedro Meseguer, Pierre Schaus, Roland Yap

CONTENTS

Editorial

Welcome to issue 1 of the CP Newsletter for 2015.

This time, the newsletter features a short summary of CP-AI-OR 2015, and we have a new article in our series on "papers with impact", kindly contributed by Mark Wallace.

Make sure to also check the section on CP Success Stories, a new initiative by the ACP, as well as the reminder to submit thesis abstracts to the thesis archive for inclusion in the Constraints journal October issue.

In the upcoming events list we have CP 2015 in Cork, including a CSPLib sprint (see below), and we also feature several summer schools and other courses.

As always, we'd appreciate any feedback and ideas for additional content. Please send us an email at newsletter@a4cp.org.

ACP reports for Q1 and Q2 2015

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months January-March 2015.

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months April-June 2015.

CP-AI-OR 2015 in Barcelona

Here is a small report on the CPAIOR conference.

After the victory of Barcelona in the Champions League, the conference could only go well. This was indeed the case.
It was a great conference in a great city and a pleasant climate (neither too hot nor too cold).
The organization of Carlos Ansotegui, Maria Bonet, Jordi Levy, and
Mateu Villaret was perfect. Congratulations to them!
The Tapas tasting and excellent social dinner of the conference definitely convinced me that Spain (or Catalogna if you prefer ;-)) has a great culinary culture.

Scientifically, the day on Monday began with two workshops (one on scheduling and one on smart cities) where presentations were very interesting.
I particularly enjoyed the presentation of Petr Vilim (IBM) in the ISA workshop who introduced the future developments of CP Optimizer for scheduling. This is the kind of presentation that you come away with many ideas for your search ;-)
I confess not to having attended all presentations of the master class on verification but I much appreciated the one of Jean Pierre Raskin (ULB) on model checking.

The three invited talks were of great interest.
The first one was on Baron Solver by John E. Swearingen (CMU), the second one on IntSat (a solver that performs very well on binary ILP) by Robert Nieuwenhuis (UTC) and the last talk was on symmetries in MIP by Jeff Linderoth (University of Wisconsin-Madison).
The talk by Jeff Linderoth was very fun. I also would like to thank @JeffLinderoth for all the translations on twitter for CP terms into MIP equivalents ;-)

In conclusion, CPAIOR was confirmed to be one of my favorite conferences: an interesting program, a good mix between theory and applications (thank you Laurent!) and interesting people to discuss with during the breaks.
I noticed that the audience this year was very young, this is also a good sign for the future of the CPAIOR community.

Pierre Schaus

Papers with impact, by Mark Wallace

In our newest addition to this series of articles, Mark Wallace reflects on his first visit to Australia.

If you've missed an earlier article from this series, you can now find all of them at http://www.a4cp.org/papers-with-impact.

Constraints journal thesis abstracts: final call

As part of the ACP thesis archive (http://www.a4cp.org/theses, already containing over 30 entries), we are collecting abstracts of PhD theses that present research on constraints. Once a year, the collected abstracts will appear in the Constraints journal. As a service to the community, the Constraints journal will make the abstracts available to all readers.

The first abstracts will appear in the October 2015 issue of Constraints. We will consider submissions of theses from the previous three years (i.e., you must have graduated on or after 1 January 2012). The extended deadline for submitting a thesis to be included in the October issue is 12 July 2015. All you need to do is to submit your thesis to the ACP archive and tick the box Submit abstract to Constraints journal:

http://www.a4cp.org/node/add/phd-thesis

Please forward this call to your recent PhD graduates as well!

CP Success Stories

In order to promote CP research to a broad audience, the ACP EC is starting an
initiative to feature successful CP-related stories on the front page of the ACP website.

We will approach researchers in the field to share their stories and
we also seek input from the community to highlight interesting stories
to us. We put the emphasis on stories that solve interesting problems
and can be communicated in an accessible manner to non-experts.

If you want to share your story or know someone who might want
to, please express your interest by sending email to n.narodytska@gmail.com.

CSPLib sprint at CP 2015

On the Saturday after the CP 2015 conference (http://booleconferences.ucc.ie/cp2015), there will be a Sprint event to make improvements to the CSPlib problem library (http://csplib.org). This event is an informal gathering of interested researchers and practitioners. The aim is to add new, interesting problems, add new solutions to existing problem instances, and work on improving references and links in the library. This is the perfect way to end the trip to Cork for the CP conference and serve as an excellent starting point to contributing to a valuable resource for the CP community. More information can be found here.